Turning theatre into law, and other spaces of politics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We assess Practicing Democracy, a play created by Headlines Theatre in Vancouver, Canada, which was the first attempt to deploy Augusto Boal's legislative theatre in North America. The goal of this project was to use forum theatre to generate creative solutions to the dangers created by provincial government cuts to social welfare, and to work with local government to turn some of these recommendations into new local government laws. This goal was not attained, although the report produced by Headlines Theatre may have supported other local initiatives. We examine the ways in which local politicians and planners maintained the distinction between expert and amateur, so as to undermine the credibility of public input. A bureaucratic process of classification and abstraction also inhibited the recommendations from being turned into law, and reinstated the expertise of politicians and bureaucrats. We balance this assessment with a reading of spaces that are excessive to this rational calculation: the city as a concrete site of embodied, creative spatial disruptions; and theatre as a pedagogical public sphere.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it